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Measuring Unikernel Cold Boot Time with Perf

A while back ago CDNs would market on their TTFB - that is the 'time to first byte'. It sounds like a really important number and the lower you can make it the more impressive it looks. At the end of the day though it doesn't really matter cause a single image can be tens of kilobytes or even megabytes in size. A single page can have 80 some odd requests and transfer multiple megabytes in resources. So while it is interesting it's a bit of a vanity metric.

In fact the majority of apps will have "real cold boot times" measured in seconds (eg: setup a db connection, load some static assets, etc.) Some engineers might be dreaming of a function-as-a-service situation where low boot times would be useful but I think the larger dev community is starting to catch on to the fact that 'serverless' can turn out to be really expensive. Finally, when it comes to kernels, if you are trying to go for a super low number (such as <10ms) you are probably starting to carve out a ton of essential capabilities that normal workloads might have so it would be wise to figure out what that list actually is.

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